Not pleased with the copyright curricula generated by Big Content, the …

Share this story

Teaching copyright to schoolkids is a recent innovation, one spurred in large part by the fantastical growth and amazing ease of digital copying—both legal and illegal. Most such programs have been drawn up by rightsholders in a not-so-subtle attempt to bolster their business models. For instance, "Think First, Copy Later: Respecting Creative Ownership" may have some educational value, but the title makes clear that this is not the kind of dispassionate material that belongs in our nation's classrooms.

Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has launched a curriculum of its own in an effort to "give students the real story about their digital rights and responsibilities on the Internet and beyond." But if the rightsholder-produced material stresses the "responsibilities" side of the equation a bit too heavily, the EFF leans predictably the other way.

The Web-based EFF curriculum is called, simply, "Teaching Copyright." It makes clear that students should not infringe copyright, but this is secondary to extended discussions about the VCR, the photocopier, audio cassettes, and blank CDs—technologies that each posed challenges to copyright holders.

In a classroom exercise on P2P music sharing, the class is asked to consider the case of a "12-year-old girl in Toledo" who is sued for file-sharing. "The 12-year-old girl downloaded the songs, but she didn't know she was doing anything illegal," we are told. "She found the files on a site that was free to access, but there were no warning signs that the bands didn't authorize the site. She's a huge fan of these bands—she owns all of their CDs and just wanted to hear the new songs."

As for the bands she downloaded, we learn that one wants her to pay for the music but the other "has a different perspective and supports music file-sharing technology, even encouraging fans to download its latest album of MP3s for free or for whatever they want to pay. Band B believes P2P file-sharing helps promote its music and encourages an even wider spectrum of music to be heard."

Needless to say, these are not the sort of perspectives stressed in "Think First, Copy Later."

The material is all accurate, as is the curricula of most rightsholders. But it's striking just how different the emphases are in these materials. The EFF's curriculum rightly says that P2P isn't just for copyright infringement because "NASA is using BitTorrent to distribute massive photographs; BitTorrent is used to cheaply distribute the Linux operating systems that are free to users."

This is absolutely true, and absolutely important. But the material glosses quickly over the absolutely epic levels of infringement taking place on P2P networks. Perhaps those are just "fair use," perhaps they should be monetized through a blanket license, but they are the major concern of rightsholders and seem at least worth discussing in more depth.

Instead, the EFF curriculum suggests that students read Cory Doctorow, Lawrence Lessig, or a paper called "Why Would Thomas Jefferson Love Napster?"

Again, great ideas, but not necessarily a complete picture of a complex debate. The curriculum seems to presuppose, in fact, that students have already been bombarded with rightsholder concerns to the point that these can almost be left out of the discussion.

An included "copyright quiz" does make clear that copying entire chapter of Harry Potter novels would not be fair use and that downloading one's favorite music is likely copyright infringement. And the EFF perspective helpfully educates kids about Creative Commons licensing, fair use, and the public domain—topics that too often get short shrift in such material.

The stakes in the "curricula wars" are high, since states like California have now mandated copyright education in the classroom. Whoever writes the textbooks can influence what students will learn; even if it's all technically correct, emphasis counts for a lot.